


A Serial Burglar

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 07:01:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18278189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: There  has been a series of burglaries...





	A Serial Burglar

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'privilege'

A Serial Burglar

by Bluewolf

Jim sat reading through the reports on a series of burglaries that had been passed to Major Crime after the owner of the last house to be burgled had been shot.

Granted, Dwight Harris had undoubtedly been unlucky; all the other burgled houses had been empty, and his should have been, but he had gone home from work early, feeling sick, and walked in on the burglars ransacking his house. Their reaction had been immediate and could have been deadly, but from what he had told the detectives from Burglary, the two men involved had been more intent on disabling him and escaping than on actually killing him.

However, they had escaped taking with them items to the value of several thousand dollars.

"And they'll probably sell the things for a fraction of their actual value," Harris had muttered disconsolately from his hospital bed when Jim spoke to him, "even though they probably knew enough to pinpoint what they wanted to steal."

Jim had nodded, apparently sympathetically. He had never cared for many of the items decorating his father's house, even as a child recognizing that they were the trappings of privilege, basically useless things that people with less money than his father could never have hoped to possess. He had a strong suspicion that many - if not all - of the things stolen from Dwight Harris and the other victims of the burglars came into that same category - either antiques or produced by modern 'big name' artists or designers, with one - no, two - things in common - all would be very expensive, and bought for display rather than use. They were items to boast about - _'See, I can afford to waste money buying this useless piece of porcelain/sculpture/artwork. Because I'm rich!'_

Oh, some of them probably did actually like some of the items - he remembered his father saying of one piece 'It's the way it feels!' and thinking at the time how much his father poo-pooed the idea of a particularl... well, sensitive sense of touch - no way could Jim ever have admitted to the nice way something felt; he would have been punished for it, probably by having whatever it was confiscated.

Now, he simply said, "We'll do what we can to track everything down, but a lot of stolen items are never recovered. All it needs is for the thieves to take the things to - say, Spokane, though it could be somewhere even closer than that, like Seattle - and sell them to a dealer there."

Harris nodded sadly. "I do understand that," he said. "And anything I've bought myself, even though I liked it, I'll be able to buy more of the same kind of thing with the insurance money. But there are some things I inherited from my grandparents, and they've got sentimental value. Yes, they're insured too, but mere money can never replace the memories... "

Jim looked at him, abruptly changing his mind about the man. Yes, he was undoubtedly showing off some of his wealth with his collection of valuable artefacts - and Jim grinned as he realized he was automatically using Blair's word to describe the items - but it had suddenly become clear to Jim that Harris recognized the importance of sentimental value, and in that moment of insight, Jim determined that if there was any way he could catch these thieves, he would.                    

"Can you describe the items?" he asked.

Harris grinned. "I can do better than that," he said. "When I inherited the things from my grandparents and went to insure them, I took photos of them. Then I thought about it, and took photos of everything I'd bought as well. The insurance company has copies of all those photos. So do I, but you'll be able to get them quicker from Cascade General Insurance - I won't get home for several days."

"All right," Jim said. "Though maybe you'd better give me a letter for them, authorizing them to let me have copies of the photos. Then I can take them to the various places that will buy that kind of artefact, see if anyone recognizes them."

He wasn't too sanguine about it, but as the cops often said - much of the time they caught someone because basically he was an idiot. Common sense would say to fence something in a different city; but a lot of the time common sense failed and items were fenced in Cascade. Certainly, a lot of the time the items involved were indistinguishable from any others of their type. Certainly the thieves were unlikely to realize that any owners would have photos of the stolen items. And they would have some sort of sob story to give to the storekeepers they approached with the stolen items. Clearing the house of a deceased elderly relative was the most likely one. The storekeepers weren't totally gullible, but faced with someone who appeared to be close on breaking down... and who appeared to have no idea of the true value of the items involved, looking amazed when told something was worth several hundred dollars - or even several thousand - claiming they had thought they would be lucky to get forty or fifty dollars... that they hadn't realized Uncle Dave had money enough to buy something that expensive... and that they'd been that close to just dumping it...

Yeah, right!

So in the morning he visited Cascade General Insurance and got copies of the items Dwight Harris had insured with them. Then he went around the various antique shops and second-hand stores - in some cases they were much the same thing - showing the shop owners the photocopies.

He landed lucky with the fourth store. Not only did the owner have the items, he was able to give a description of the men who had sold the things to him.

Jim phoned for a sketch artist, who did a sketch of each from Murray Osman's description.

Back at the PD Jim showed Simon the sketches.

Simon looked at them, and stiffened. He touched one. "This is Matt Torrance!"

"Matt Torrance?" Jim asked.

"He's got a record for theft that goes back ten, fifteen years... His last prison sentence... He got out about six months ago. And that would coincide with the start of this last spate of robberies!"

From there it was a very short step to arresting both Torrance and his younger brother Bryan, instantly recognized by Jim when he called at the house as the man in the second sketch.

They hadn't tried selling all of the items they had stolen to Osman; they had gone around several places - but when Jim showed the sketches to different antiques storekeepers, they were instantly identified.

Not all of the stolen items were recovered, but most were - including all of Dwight Harris's - and the Torrance brothers ended up incarcerated in Starkville.

Jim went home after the trial and sentencing with a headache, wishing that Blair hadn't been away at the Police Academy in Olympia during the investigation, and glad that his partner would be finishing his police training in another few days.

This had been a relatively easy case to solve; but things were always so much easier when Blair was with him!


End file.
